The Love Machines

After his first marriage ended in divorce, Steven Rudin, 42, decided to have a go at online dating. He wasn't expecting much. In December 1998, he logged onto a website he'd heard about devoted to matching prospective mates with an interest in rural life, countrysingles.com Soon enough one profile caught his eye, that of Ann Christensen, also 42. Within a few weeks, the two were e-mailing each other, and by February they were engaged. Rudin moved from Seattle to Fresno, Calif., found a job as an auto mechanic, and last June he married Christensen, a customer-service rep with an agricultural company. The newlyweds completed their rural idyll by settling down on a 30-acre raisin farm. "If you had told me that I would wind up meeting my great love this way," says Rudin, "I would have said you were crazy."

Crazy or not, the world of online dating is certainly booming, with millions of willing singles hunched over keyboards touch-typing their best smooth lines. "It's to the point where mothers are actually telling single daughters to search for their husbands on the Web," says Trish McDermott of Match.com an Internet dating service that boasts about 100,000 active members. Like similar services, Match.com attempts to rationalize and organize that messiest of human endeavors--finding love, or its closest substitute. Users, who pay $100 a year, fill out a questionnaire listing their height and weight and personal interests. Like brokerage customers screening mutual funds according to their desire for current income or long-term capital appreciation, users also specify their romantic goals. Are they seeking an e-mail pen pal? A life partner? Finally, users receive a roster of other members who meet their criteria, and the e-chase is on.

In many ways, this is courtship as it once was, before the advent of the singles bar. There is plenty of conversation but no touching. With the computer serving as a chaperon, guaranteeing that no one gets too close, tastes are compared, as are family backgrounds, hopes and dreams. Much as sites such as Priceline and eBay encourage old-fashioned economic behavior--one bids, one negotiates, one doesn't pay retail--the dating sites serve as 19th century parlors where couples sit in chairs and chat. Even the word chat is slightly antique, recalling porch swings and glasses of iced tea.

"You're actually seeing couples court each other and build up some level of intimacy," says psychologist Alan Clark of Santa Monica, Calif. "This can help make relationships more meaningful and exciting down the road."

Online dating also puts a premium on verbal fluency, another bygone romantic skill. The sonneteers competed to shower their ladies with flowery metaphors and witty images; online suitors are also obliged to charm. "The written word promotes people talking about themselves without the self-consciousness of how do I look, how am I dressed," says Andrea Baker, a sociologist at Ohio University. She sees the Internet as a haven for the shy, the tongue tied and the thoughtful. "You have the chance to think about what you say and revise what you say and add to what you say." Also, says Jim Fraenkel, 29, a New York television producer, "all of a sudden, there's a forum for meeting people that doesn't involve alcohol or staying out till 4 in the morning."